An MIT Sloan School of Management expert on U.S. vaccine markets is “cautiously hopeful” that public and private sector players are far better prepared for North America’s upcoming flu season than they have been for earlier flu pandemics.
“Regulators, vaccine manufacturers, and public health agencies have been working very hard at coordination, both domestically and globally,” said MIT Sloan Professor Ernst R. Berndt, co-author of a recent book about the development and delivery of vaccines. Though a major mutation of the virus could create problems, Berndt says vaccine makers, government agencies, and others are better prepared to respond to the current virus outbreak.
“We are now benefiting from actions taken over several years, such as creating incentives in this nation for manufacturers to develop vaccines and build plants to produce them,” said Berndt. “We’re in relatively good shape on the manufacturing side, though we’re not quite sure what to manufacture because of potential mutations of the H1N1 virus.”
Berndt, who said a vaccine for the current H1N1strain should be in production by October,” noted that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration “has plans in place to expedite as much as possible any regulatory actions needed to approve the vaccine.”
Further evidence that public and private entities are better prepared is seen in recommendations by an advisory committee to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) about priority populations for the H1N1 vaccine. Top priority groups include pregnant women, people with children under six months old, and health care and emergency services personnel.
Though the CDC reports that H1N1 is spreading in the Southern Hemisphere, where the regular flu season is underway, Berndt noted that it does not appear to be undergoing major mutations. “That means we can base a vaccine on the current version of the virus,” he said. “But as the surprising outbreak of the virus in the United Kingdom shows, we must monitor the situation extremely closely and be prepared to react.”